Bakcoin

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Intro - what is?

'bakcoin' is, at the time of this writing, nothing more than a thought experiment. The subject of the thought experiment is on a 'reserve currency' which is significantly inspired by 'bitcoin'.

post-intro intro:

A sponge is considered to be one of the most ancient multi-celled animals. It's a fascinating critter. The individual cells have different functions, but they each sort of have a mind of their own and move about the structure of the organism at will. An odd and magical property which falls out of this design is that one can mash a sponge through a sieve and eventually a new very similar sponge will form on the other side. Sponges live by filtering nutrients out of water. Later creatures have become generally better at doing this, but the sponge is perfectly capable of doing it well. They reproducing and occupy many environs and some they even dominate. They have been doing it longer than any animal around.

A Starfish is a much more advanced creatures than a sponge. (An echinoderm if I recall correctly, and this is the only family in the animal kingdom that displays radial symmetry...but that is an aside.) An funny thing about a starfish is that they are a bit of a pest in some areas. If some annoyed and unwitting human decides to rectify an over-abundance of starfish by chopping them, he's in for a surprise. He'll have a new starfish for every piece (well, every piece that includes part of it's original central disk.)

Maybe one could just poison the hell out of these pesky sponges and starfish littering up the environment and sucking up plankton and shellfish?

Chemical Warfare has been used certain conflicts through history. Science and war came to a horrifying collision during WW-I which produced the most well known and systematic use of chemical warfare but since then only a few conflicts have employed it, and then only relatively sparingly. (Basically it practical mostly if a superpower would like a test-bed for chemical weapons effects analysis and will lend assistance...as Saddam Hussein and Don Rumsfeld have demonstrated.) It might seem heartening that humans seem to have become generally more civilized, but don't get your hopes up; chemical weapons are actually rather ineffective on the battlefield in many cases and pose a multitude of dangers to the user, and that probably has the most to do with the century of relatively limited use that we've enjoyed.

I (tvbcof, the original author) find a lot of things interesting, but these three also provided specific inspiration for certain aspects of the 'bakcoin' project.

Why?

Bitcoin is a remarkable and novel development which has introduced the world to 'crypto currencies'. There are three possible properties of a crypto-currancy system which we feel are critical but also, unfortunately, collide with one another:

Feature rich 'exchange currency' function which can scale all the way to service for a fair fraction of all transactions globally.

solid 'reserve currency' function which can survive in perpetuity.

system survivability under direct and coordinated attack by entities who control nearly all of the available network infrastructure.

The solution presented here addresses these by splitting the problem into two layers.

And a multitude of 'exchange currencies' which are in a constant state of being born, being re-born, competing, and evolving.

While the 'exchange currencies' are the key element of the system, they are not the focus of this document. Because the focus of 'bakcoin' is to foster and support 'exchange currencies' and much of it's design revolves around doing so, we will invent several hypothetical ones which will be found here and there in this document. Because it is a key concept, I will call special attention to the 'multitude' wording and pluralization associated with 'exchange currencies'. This is how we achieve scalability and most importantly, 'evolution' which it is hoped will lead to more robust and powerful end-user solutions more quickly.

'bakcoin' itself both survives forever and is found anywhere any (supported) 'exchange currency' is used. For this reason it is designed to be as 'tight' as possible. Since it is specifically not an 'exchange currency', and for other reasons, it lacks many of the niceties of an 'exchange currency'. For instance, it is high latency (say, a block per day), cumbersome and costly to spend, and aggressively trimmed.

bkc_site_d1

WTF!

'bakcoin' has a couple of possible startling properties. As something of a teaser, I will list a few of them here. The rationals will be expanded upon elsewhere in this set of documentation.

'bakcoin' is unabashedly deflationary.

We start out with all possible BKC in existence and as time proceeds, we trim them.

'bakcoin' is 'use it or lose it'.

If BKC are not deployed in support of a supported 'exchange currencies', they will evaporate at a higher rate.

'bakcoin' will probably lose you money.

You might be able to get rich off them, but probably not very reliably or quickly.